Online kitchen design

Planning a new kitchen can be an exciting and daunting task, especially when it is coupled with moving into a new home.

Most of the time, the primary goal of planning a kitchen is to make the best use of very limited space.

But if you're moving into a house and are planning a radical change that involves building work, such as converting two rooms into a kitchen-diner, things begin to get more complicated.

For example, the kitchen 'work triangle' that is needed for optimum efficiency, and the effect the new space might have on the rest of the rooms in the house, will need to be taken into consideration. When there is often storage fitted at both base and eye level, it can be difficult to picture how the space will look just from studying 2D floor plans. When major features, such as the appliances like the cooker, fridge, sink and storage units, are being relocated, a redesigned kitchen can be even more difficult to visualise than a basic refit. It's essential, therefore, that a new kitchen is planned carefully, using 2D and 3D diagrams, and that's where online kitchen design tools come into their own, as apart from anything else, they can provide inspiration and delight.

Of course, planning and buying a new kitchen requires experts and specialist kitchen design software to plan and fit every cupboard and shelf to the last millimetre. But kitchen planning is still an important factor to consider, even when a customer is still at the house-buying stage. Prospective house buyers still need to be able to think ahead and visualise how their living spaces will look, at least in concept form, before making that all important commitment to purchase the property in the first place.

Kitchen Design Software

It's difficult enough for prospective home buyers to remember the details of all the properties they've viewed, which is why Metropix's range of floor plan solutions, 3D renderings and 'Picture Plus' software can be so useful to interact with online. But when they're also planning to make major changes to their new home, like the redesign of a kitchen, a good online visualisation tool is essential, and here Metropix really can help. The quick and easy 'Draw Your Own' online software can create floorplans - both existing and proposed - in a matter of minutes. And unlike many quick 'design my kitchen' tools, the Metropix interactive 'Space Planner' and '3D Floor Plan' features, both free upgrades for 'Draw Your Own' subscribers, can generate a 3D image directly from a 2D floor plan. This provides the customer with a conceptual visualisation of how the new kitchen might look - not only from points within the kitchen itself but as an integral part of the home.

Metropix's solutions work just as well as an online kitchen planning tool as they do for the planning of any other room in a house, and the versatile functions mean that the virtual home can be visualised in a number of ways.

For example, if the plans are already stored in the 'Plan Bank', they can be called up instantly and customised. This is ideal if the prospective buyer is considering making alterations to the structure of the property. If the customer is averse to DIY drawing, they can sketch a plan and fax or email it to Metropix, who will produce a professional 2D floor plan instead. The free upgrade to colour floor plans, which includes icons for features and furniture, can produce an immediate representation of the customer's current and planned kitchen layouts. With its optional displays of room and area measurements, it's a great way of quantifying and representing storage space. From there, a 3D rendering of a planned kitchen can be generated that will help bring the concept to life and give an idea of how the kitchen will work. As with any kitchen planning software, the 3D aspect allows views from different points within the planned space, but Metropix's software can take it one step further.

Once the virtual kitchen is fully fitted out, you can create a video of the space using the '3D Walkthrough' software. This allows the viewer to gain a genuine feel for the space and layout of the kitchen and how it would function as a part of the home. They can assess the strengths and pitfalls of their design and modify it accordingly. And of course, when it comes to the finer points of the planning, such as the colour scheme, furnishing and decor, the online kitchen design 3D software has a wide variety of features, colours and styles to accurately represent the final look of the kitchen.

Create a Kitchen

With the Metropix suite of software, a prospective house purchaser can build a conceptual plan of their kitchen from the ground up, including any proposed structural changes to the property. Not only that, after the purchase has gone through, the online kitchen design they created with the Metropix software continues to be useful. It can provide an excellent visualisation that can be taken to a professional kitchen planner and fitter so that they can take the designs to the next level and turn the concept into a reality, that way the flooring, handles, lighting, worktops and all the other options you have chosen are bound to fit.